Databases are used in a variety of different computer systems today for a vast number of purposes. For example, databases can be used to manage contact information such as first names, last names, and phone numbers. Databases are also used on a variety of scales. For example, a database can be used by an individual user to store that user's list of friends and relatives, or by a corporation to store employee, customer, or financial information. Databases are also used for electronic commerce to store item descriptions and the state of transactions with customers, and to manage inventory.
Despite the widespread use of databases, the creation and maintenance of databases has remained a task for specialized engineers and designers. For instance, to create a table in a database a specialized person needs to know the data types provided by the database for database fields, any limitations on the length of data that can be stored for each data type, the precision available for numeric data types, and whether a particular data type is indexable, just to name a few examples. Moreover, since the features and requirements of databases delivered by different vendors vary substantially, a specialized person typically specializes in the database products of only one vendor. Some database products, for example, have strict requirements for field names, such as that field names be limited to 30 characters in length, start with a letter, and only contain letters and numbers without spaces or other symbols. Some database products support data types that others do not, and some allow operations that others do not, such as renaming fields or tables after they are created.
The differences in database implementations and the inherent complexities in databases increase the difficulty of working with databases and restrict the number of users qualified to create and maintain databases. This prevents a large number of users from being able to benefit from the power of databases to store and organize their information for a variety of purposes.
Another problem with traditional databases is the difficulty of creating user interfaces to interact with database data. Providing meaningful interaction with a database to end users generally requires the creation of a custom client application using one of several database communication protocols. These protocols vary based on the database vendor and require programming skills to create an application to use them. More recent databases have allowed access from the web using a standard web browser, but they still require the skills of a web developer to create web pages that pull information from the database and format it for display in the browser. The creation of a database and a user interface to access it often requires a skilled team of specialized programmers and operations personnel. Since many organizations do not have such a skilled team, many opportunities for use of such a database to improve the efficiency of the organization are not realized.